Posts tagged android

It has been reported that Microsoft Lync for iOS, Android and WP7, will be released later today. An announcement was made last Friday that Lync would be available on all major smart phones on 12th December, it has not yet been made available so we can only assume that it’ll be appearing in app stores later today.

Update: It appearls that Lync is actually coming out the week of 12th December, so expect to see it later this week.

Here is a feature comparison of Microsoft Lync on all supported smart phones:

Update: Microsoft released Lync 2010 for Windows Phone on Monday. Today the app has become available on the Android Market place. It is still yet to appear on the App Store.

Yesterday, the official Microsoft Australia Twitter confirmed that Microsoft Lync will be coming to smartphones’ in the next four weeks, however Microsoft have yet to make an official announcement. The tweet does mention Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows phone 7, but does not mention Symbian, which had previously been reported as a supported platform.

Microsoft recently announced that Lync for Mac would soon be available for customers. Now we are hearing that Lync will be available for some mobile devices before the end of the calendar year. Lync will become available on Windows Phone, Android, iOS and Symbian devices by the end of this year, which will join Blackberry devices that can already use the service. Microsoft are rather quickly closing the gap of incompatibility between different platforms, but then this should be expected as Google are a hot competitor in this area of service. This will enable users of the service to instantly talk to any colleague that is online whilst on the move.

It appears that Microsoft Office 365 is a little vague when it comes to their mobile phone compatibility. It appears that each type of phone has different functinality.

Both the Android and iOS can view the team site in a very basic and unattractive web page, there is no supported application for either phones. The mobile view can access all workspace areas from the home page and from there navigate through all the pages.When viewing any list, the list will just show the title until you click on it. The user is still able to upload new items to a list, custom or stock. Features such as workflows do not work and calendars only work in an extremely basic form. Documents are also viewable in the web browser but are not editable, it is also not possible to upload files to SharePoint.

Office 365 compatibility with Nokia’s smartphone OS is a little different (possibly due to Nokia’s recent deal with microsoft?) Most of the features in Nokia are pretty much the same as Android/iOS with the exception of being able to download and edit documents from the team site on the device. Unfortunately, I cannot comment any further on the Nokia OS as I am yet to test it personally.

Microsoft have this to say about Blackberry’s Exchange compatibility:

“The previously available Hosted BlackBerry for Microsoft Exchange Online will not be available for Office 365. Instead, RIM will provide BlackBerry Business Cloud Services as part of a Beta offering by end of 2011. BlackBerry Business Cloud Services will have an improved feature set compared to the Hosted BlackBerry service. The service will be hosted, licensed, and supported by RIM and will be offered at $0 per user per month. The service will require the appropriate BlackBerry data plan from the customer’s mobile operator.”

The Office 365 Team Site’s and other work spaces, work on the blackberry much like they do on the Android and iOS.

It appears Microsoft have not really paid any attention to any mobile phone operating system other than their own. Windows Phone 7 has its own SharePoint application, which is extremely feature rich. From this application the user can collaborate with PC users on a word, excel, powerpoint and one note documents. The user can browse the pages and lists in a very appealing (windows tiles) user interface.

The email system works much the same on all smart phones, they connect to outlook using Microsoft Exchange active Sync. On the iPhone, the user only needs to enter the email address and password and the rest is done automatically, on android the user enters the same information plus the server domain which is, in this instance is; pod51014.outlook.com

Despite the unattractive user interface it is still an improvement on the SharePoint 2003 as the page is loaded as it is on a PC making it difficult to view on a small screen.